The Lyrical in Epic Time reaffirms David Der-wei Wang's position as the world's preeminent scholar of modern Chinese literature, and this monograph ranges far beyond literature. Besides his writings in Chinese, including literary histories, criticism and edited series of emergent Taiwan and mainland authors' works, Wang has published state-of-the-art English-language monographs about realism (Fictional Realism in 20th-Century China, Columbia University Press, 1992), apprehensions of modernity (Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, Stanford University Press, 1997), and unease with history (The Monster That Is History, California University Press, 2004) in Chinese fiction. In the 500-page work under review Wang turns to diverse expressions and functions of shuqing (lyricism) in literature and the arts during China's (and the Japanese empire's) mid-20th century time of war, imperialism and revolution. By emphasizing Chinese contributions to the international and multilingual discourse of lyricism in modern times, Wang continues his career-long mission of defining distinctively Chinese “alternative modernities.” His shuqing is an ancient tradition that stimulated or mediated particular Chinese creators' transitions, crises, epiphanies and compromises as they reinvented themselves amid the massive 20th-century tumult, via new or redefined personal dedications to literary criticism (Chen Shih-hsiang and others), art history (Shen Congwen), poetry (He Qifang and Feng Zhi), essays and autobiography (Hu Lancheng), music (Jiang Wenye), painting (Lin Fengmian), film (Fei Mu) and calligraphy (Tai Jingnong). Wang's biographical subjects were not always the most famous contemporary Chinese creators in their fields (except perhaps for opera singer Mei Lanfang and poet Ai Qing, both of whom Wang also discusses in depth), but as case studies these figures are broadly revealing.

“Shuqing” in this book retains its diverse meanings, including (authentic) self-expression (yan zhi, expressing the will, instead of zai Dao, transmitting the Way); expression of qing – feelings – whether personal or from cosmic resonance; individuation (giving definition to a self or ziwo); and giving voice to a primal cosmic creative urge (xing). Emotion seems little differentiated from feeling in the old Chinese discourse, but it enters modern shuqing through Western Romantic influences that Wang also discusses. Among the stimuli for Wang's own inquiry are Jaroslav Průšek's dichotomy of the lyrical vs. the epic in his East/West comparative studies, Berkeley professor Chen Shih-hsiang's 1950s' explication of lyricism (xing) as the predominant mode in Chinese literature since antiquity, and above all the dilemmas of Chinese writers and artists (including those working in a Japanese-controlled realm, like Hu Lancheng and Jiang Wenye) who chose self-expression while a herd mentality and state power enjoined cultural creators to serve practical collective needs. Exhortations to voice a uniform, epic national discourse did not extinguish lyricism. Moreover, Wang argues, China's grand tradition of lyricism embodies an “epic time” of its own, with rhythms alternative to those of the twentieth-century power struggles. “Epic” may be the more ambiguous term in the proposed dichotomy, particularly in Chinese discourse. In this book, “epic” encompasses that which is dramatic, collective, social, outward-looking, momentous, large-scale, “sublime,” in unison, uni-directional, grand, or slow (protracted). An idiosyncratically (hence lyrically) slow-paced drama can be rhythmically epic (p. 296).

The style and reasoning of Wang's analyses and interpretations tend toward unification of opposites and metaphorical, at times poetic, associations more often than reductionism. This is common in today's Chinese literary and cultural studies, but Wang's recent analyses are noteworthy for their discriminating rather than simply agglutinative deployments of ancient and contemporary critical theory. Like C. T. Hsia and Leo Ou-fan Lee, David Wang has seeded an entire field with his students, yet he is his own school. I would call it a Chinese new historicism, or a Sinophone new historicism (Sinophone in the broad sense, embracing centred concepts of Sinitic cultural production instead of excluding them). The original new historicists could see the whole capitalist world of today and yesteryear reflected in an anecdote; Wang's discipline-crossing net, like Indra's, can see an entire culture reflected in a drop of ink: an anecdote, epiphany, essay, or turning point in a putatively marginal artistic life. The difference is that the new historicists emphasized relations of power and positioning, critically, like Marx and Foucault. Wang's syntheses tend to be positive, self-depositioning and magnanimous, conducive to a united front. He sees not Zen, deconstructive, other-directed, or materially exploitative “emptiness” in his subjects' mutually reflecting mid-century choices and predicaments – not even their betrayals (by Hu Lancheng, unfaithful to his wives and countries), nervous breakdowns induced by class warfare (Shen Congwen), or unseemly ideological turnarounds (Feng Zhi) – but ingenuity and resilience in their drastic revisions of the human spirit and its expressions.

Specialists are bound to differ with this book's interpretations of particular events, lives and works. For instance, I consider Shen Congwen during his 1940s' midlife crisis to have been reaching for spiritual transcendence, not just the new aesthetics this book emphasizes. Only one with David Wang's command of Sinophone and Anglophone creativity and cultural studies scholarship could pull all these works into such an imaginatively integrated, itself epic, analysis.